Narratives of the week : September 20

Vibes shift, $SUI fastest horse, VC coins leading

Welcome to this weekly recap, I am Viktor and you can find me here on Twitter and here on Telegram. Enjoy your reading !

$BTC and the market overall

In the last edition of this newsletter, $BTC was standing at $55k, and the overall sentiment was a mix of apathy and fear. Now things have completely reversed. $BTC went as high as $64K today, and everyone is progressively getting bullish again, with “vibes shifting”.

The meaningful event for the price of cryptos has been the FOMC on September 18. The market was undecided between a 25 bps or a 50 bps Fed rate cut, and we did end up having a 50 bps rate cut. This suggests that more liquidity will come into the market, and that is usually bullish for the price of $BTC and of risk assets. The S&P 500 made a new ATH the day after the FOMC, and $BTC also reacted very positively with a +4% pump in a few hours.

I am not a macro expert but what I see is that the US economy is not in an extremely concerning situation, while the rates are going down… that is bullish for crypto (and especially $BTC), simple as that.

As you can also see below, altcoins have been showing a new pattern compared to the previous month, since they have put a higher low in, and are at the very least consolidating instead of trending down.

Saylor announced today that he has bought over $400M worth of $BTC over a week, which could have been helping the price to move up too. One week ago, he announced that he had bought $1.1 worth of BTC in a month, and it marked a low timeframe local bottom on the chart. The fact that we are not dumping much on the news is bullish in itself. I am currently cautiously bullish. Most of my spot has been allocated for months, but I am neutral to short on perps with very low size because I have been too conditioned to fade pumps over the last few months. I have the feeling that it’s the same for many people and when everyone is sidelined, things can pump hard.

$ETH remains one of the weakest assets in the market, with ETHBTC reaching 0.0385 a few days ago… (it’s above 0.04 again now). The absence of ETH ETF inflows has been very concerning in my opinion and explains this poor price action.

$SUI is the fastest horse

The most notably strong coin by far over the last 10 days has been $SUI. It is up 2x in 2 weeks and currently trades at above $15bn FDV. It is currently the fastest horse, so if we are really entering into a period of sustained strength, it will probably remain the fastest horse.

But on the other side, you might know that I have said a few times that ARB/OP/SUI/APT/TIA/STRK FDVs have all been trading in line for several months, and now we have $SUI being around twice larger than all of them. SUI has also made a new ATH versus $APT, and they are two very similar projects (Move based new gen alt L1s). What’s more, all these new VC coins have have had a ceiling around $20bn to $25bn FDV, and $SUI is now getting close to that. If SUI is able to convincingly break this ceiling, it might be in a new league but until then, my baseline assumption is that it does not have much room to grow in the short-term…

All the SUI ecosystem coins have been doing well too, $CETUS and $SCA up 2x in two weeks, and the $BLUB memecoin pumped from $3M to a $30M market cap.

VC coins are leading

$SUI is a VC coin, and it being the strongest coin among large caps, is good evidence that the pendulum swung back between VC coins and memecoins, as it’s mostly the VC coins that caught a bid compared to memecoins in the last 10 days (after months of underperformance by VC coins). Besides $SUI, some of the strongest coins have been $SAGA (+84% in a week), $TIA (+48%), $DYM (+48%), $ALT (+44%), $ZETA (+34%), $BIGTIME (+30%).

$TIA has a very massive unlock in October, which is why the short is very crowded on $TIA, with funding rates oscillating between -100% and -400% yearly. $ZRO is another VC coin that is overall doing well but it tends to not exactly move with the market.

With +50% gains in a week, $TAO has also been a leader of the current pump, even if it is not exactly a VC coin, but a low float high FDV one.

In the gaming category, $BIGTIME pumped more than 2x, $IMX and $MAVIA have been doing well too.

The alt L1 trade never dies

$SUI is not only a VC coin, but it’s also an alt L1, and its strength suggests that the alt L1 trade will always come back, and will always be among the best ones to take. $SAGA, $TIA, $DYM and $ZETA can all be considered as L1s too. The ‘older’ L1s have not been as strong, besides $FTM, which benefits a lot from the Sonic rebrand/launch catalyst. It is up +70% in 2 weeks.

$AVAX usually lags the other L1s and then becomes a great catchup play. It is sort of what happened in the last 3 days with a +20% pump.

Solana mid caps strength

On the topic of alt L1s, $SOL has been mostly lagging until the last 2 days where it pumped from $130 to $150. But what is noticeable is that many of the Solana ecosystem mid caps have been outperforming massively (whereas large caps such as JUP, JTO and PYTH were less noticeable). Here are the 30d performance for some of them :

• $CLOUD : +137%

• $DRIFT : +68%

• $PRCL : +73%

• $ZEUS : +73%

• $KMNO : +90%

Most of these coins have been launched in bad conditions whereas the largest ones (JTO, PYTH, JUP) were launched in good conditions… mean reversion now ?

About memecoins

As I mentioned before, memecoins are mostly muted compared to VC coisn, $PEPE has basically been mirroring the overall altcoin move without outperformance, same thing for $WIF.

One memecoin is particularly noticeable, and that is $POPCAT. It is now very close to its previous ATH at around $1bn market cap, and it’s almost up 4x from its pico bottom in early September. The other cat coins have been doing decently too, with $MEW up +37% in a week after a listing on Revolut, $MOG up +30% too.

$BABYDOGE is up +150% and $TURBO is up +80%, after both of them have been listed on Binance spot. The other strong midcap mememecoins have been $PEPECOIN, $PONKE and $GIGA.

$MOTHER is also up +70% in a week, and if I am correct, Iggy is hosting a party tonight so there might be a sell the news effect ?

The NEIRO saga continues

The NEIRO saga literally never ends. $NEIROETH has been able to pump from $30M market cap to almost $200M. And what happened surprisingly a few days ago is that Binance listed $NEIRO on Binance spot… but not NEIROETH, it listed NEIRO CTO (!?!) which is the other NEIRO on ETH and which was around $15M market cap at the time…

This pushed $NEIROETH down massively (below $100M) and giga pumped $NEIRO CTO which went to $150M market cap almost instantly and then reached $400M a few days after that. There is probably a strong Binance cabal behind this one, so be very careful if you plan to short it…

Thank you for reading this article,
Cheers,
Viktor.